I’ll bet a bunch of you kinda know where this is going with the title that I gave this blog. I see you.

The thing is, I have a conference coming up at the end of October. I also have the opportunity to hit up some beta readers in October. And the conference has pitches built into it. Therefore, I really need to have my novel revised by October 1.

Nanowrimo (National Novel Writing Month) is coming up on November 1. October is traditionally the month to plan a novel anyway (which I am now calling OctNoPlaMo). This year and maybe this year only, then, September will be SepNoEdMo.

I am aware that the acronym is wrong. (Is it an acronym when it takes chunks of letters instead of just the first letter? Is there another name for that?) Technically the word “November” is nowhere to be found in “NaNoWriMo,” but—correct me if I’m wrong—it’s always felt like it was in there, what with all the N’s and the “No.” And just changing the “Wri” to “Ed” and “Pla” (Nanoedmo and Nanoplamo) would be boring. So here it is, my slightly nonsensically named Sepnoedmo: September Novel Editing Month. Or maybe even September’s Novel Editing Month. It is.

At any rate, I am gearing up this week finishing another project (that I promised someone) so that on September 1 (two days!, this Sunday!) I will be at the laptop digging way down deep into editing the novel that I am going to pitch at the conference. Which by the way is the novel that I wrote 50,000 words on two Nanos ago and finished this past March. (Last year for Nano I was distracted by another book that I had been working on at a residency in October and that’s the one I’m going to work on this Nanowrimo again. I think. I mean, if I sell the first book in a trilogy then they’ll probably make me work on the second one. Fingers crossed that I have a they sometime soon.)

I can’t give it a number, however. In other words, there won’t be a goal, exactly, which is what makes Nanowrimo what it is. I have tried to enter number goals before for editing, but it doesn’t always work out. Sure, you can say that each page edited equals X words and then do that, but if you are not doing a direct read-through edit or a proof-reading kind of thing, then there are no pages to count to begin with. I am using Fictionary for my story-level edit, so I won’t be moving page by page, I’ll be jumping around.

Actually, I just thought of something. I could give time an arbitrary page number. Figure out the number of hours I could put in daily that would stretch me like Nanowrimo would, almost to the point of impossibility, and give it a number. You know, Nanowrimo lets you make goals at any time of the year, now? I could run my own Sepnoedmo on Nonowrimo’s site. That’s what I’ll do. It’ll be great. I just need to do some math. The max amount of hours I could imagine putting in each day and then divide 1,667 by that. Then each hour equals that many words, every quarter hour a quarter of that, and I won’t break it down any smaller. For every fifteen minutes I’m editing I will tell Nano’s site that I wrote whatever that word-number is. Cool.

We’ll talk Octnoplamo in about a month.

Feel free to join me. I have to go; I have work to do.